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Game Console Energy Usage Comparison
Broadband writes "Modern gaming consoles consume more and more power, dissipate more and more heat and cause a lot more noise with their cooling systems compared to their brethren a decade ago.
While it's obvious that an Xbox 360 would have higher energy demands then a Playstation 1, the curious question is by how much? Even more importantly is the question of whether your console might be costing you money while you sleep. Preposterous you say? Actually quite the opposite!
We put every console in our lab through rigorous testing to find the answers to these questions and see who the energy hogs really are. "
Console Dashboard Energy Use
Playstation 1 4W
Playstation 2 23W
Xbox 61W
Xbox 360 145W
Gamecube 20W
Dreamcast 17W
"Last Updated: 6/18/2006" and no PSone and PStwo figures ? hmmm...
I'll change my sig when I have the time...
I don't see the merit of comparing consoles from different generations for their power comsumption. Of course they need more juice... but they're doing a lot more with it.
??? I can get you an ARM board that'll be three times as fast as a Pentium 90, but use barely a fraction of the power.
Believe it or not, computer equipment *is* getting more efficient. The problem is that massive amounts of power are being dumped into them for "maximum performance". Shades of Alpha?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wrong. Dreamcast was part of the N64/PS1 generation.
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
RTFA, or use your common sense; to turn it off fully you have to unplug it. A better question would be "Who the cares about a $2.68 per year saving on electricity?"
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The catch is this--the "off button" doesn't really turn the cable box off, because it wants to keep processing the program information data ("Friends is on channel 7 at 7:30) that's being trickled down the cable, that requires the tuners and microprocessor and such to be on, leaving little difference in power use for the cable box between "on" and "off". This means that, when I turn the TV on, it can be 10-20 minutes before I have a fully populated program grid.
I'm a nature photographer.
Hoover Dam is 2074 megawatts and nuclear is between 600 and 1200 MW. So drop your figures by a factor of 20 for Hoover Dam: 36 hoover dams for xbox 360; 1 Hoover Dam for PS.
:wq
Hoover Dam is 2074 megawatts and nuclear is between 600 and 1200 MW. So drop your figures by a factor of 20 for Hoover Dam: 36 hoover dams for xbox 360; 1 Hoover Dam for PS.
And the astute observer would note that I didn't add in the factor of 1000 for going from kilowatt to megawatt. So that's 1/50 of a Hoover Dam for xbox 360 and 1/1000 for PS.
Meh, it's Sunday morning...
:wq
Well, they still repeatedly said that the PS3 would more than likely run into the Xbox360' ballpark (>100W) and maybe even beat it at power consumption, and that the Wii was very likely to run much cheaper (they forgot to say that Connect24 was likely to kill the 'idle' power savings though)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
That's an annual leak of 1.8 terawatts.
Actually, it would be 1.8 terrawatt hours (assuming the same rate of usage). 1 W = 1 J/s. "An annual leak of 1.8 terawatts" makes about as much sense as "an annual distance traveled of 180 km/h." For the record, 1 kWh = 1000 W * 1 h = 1000 J/s * 3600 s = 3600000 J = 3.6 megajoules.
And what's the impact on the environment of generating that energy?
A lot smaller than the impact on the environment of having all those fatcats in Hollywood living their lavish lifestyle. A lot smaller than the impact on the environment of people in third world countries having 12 children per family (especially after a few generations, after exponential growth takes place e.g. in 3 generations: 12^3=1728 vs. 1.3^3=2.197 (approximate average European fertility rate -- children per woman)). A lot smaller than a lot of other things you don't seem to care much about.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Fail, the DreamCast came earlier than the other consoles from it's generation, but it was the same generation as the PS2, Xbox and GC (hint: the PS1 killed the Saturn while the full-of-lies announce of the PS2 slaughtered the DreamCast)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
So much for armchair EEs... There's this thing called Power Factor Correction - PFC. Pretty much ALL modern power supplies have it. If you want to sell in Europe, or most countries, you have to have a power supply with a PFC rating of 0.99 or better. Guess what? That means your power supply is essentially RESISTIVE. When the voltage peaks, the current peaks - the two are in phase.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Interesting, but ridiculously overplayed. The costs of operating a game console over the course of a year is pretty much nothing. Even taking the most expensive: $20.00 a year to operate Xbox 360... is still 5 cents a day. I'm sure the gamer can take the half second and pull that out of the couch he is sitting on.
It's always confirmation bias!
It will in fact be right - study the google:
& client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficia l&q=0.2+watts+*+365+days+in+kWh&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.ca/search?hs=IDf&hl=en&safe=off
> Now, driving your CAR supports mideast oil barons. Easy solution...drill
a de_and_investment/energyrel050328-en.asp
> off the East and West Coast as well as in Alaska.
Funny, the US gets more of its oil from Canada than Saudi Arabia, and the trend is only increasing:
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/can-am/washington/tr
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/canada.html
I print, therefore I am.
The point is that when people do turn the damn thing off, it still draws power and the only way to avoid that is physical disconnection from the electrical supply.
Worryingly, this not only applies to consoles, but PCs and monitors too.
I measured the power some PCs were drawing in their "off" state - not hibernation, or suspend-to-RAM, or what-have-you, but "off". A recent Athlon 64 drew 19W; a 2001 dual Athlon drew a whopping 30W! The two monitors I tested in their "off" state (certainly not standby or sleep) drew around 7W.
In fact, the power supplies themselves are partly to blame. I reached round the back of the machines, flicked the PSU power switches to off so that (presumably) nothing was being used by the motherboards, and they still drew 9-12W!
This isn't about leaving things on standby or low-energy states. It's about "off" not meaning "off" anymore.
The Watts per performance unit have been getting lower lately, not higher. That is obviously offset by the performance increasing. So the original poster's point was that it's really unknown how that balances out.
When the PS1 was first released, it probably used a lot more power than when they re-released it several years later. If they were to build a PSone today using the very latest technology, it would probably consume less than a Watt at full tilt.
E pluribus unum
i think you're thinking the sega saturn from the fifth generation PS1/N64 era. the DC was a 6th generation system.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
The PS2 have a real ON/OFF switch on its back. On the front, it's the standby mode. If you don't want it to consume any energy, flip the switch.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
I run 3 pcs, 2 19" CRTs, and a stack of add on stuff, and when all powered up, it pulls around 430watts. power supply ratings have nothing to do with power consumption.
note: with the monitors off, everything pulls about 280 watts
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
A top-end PC uses about 155W idle and 320W max.
7 &p=4
source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=271
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Option B: take 5 minutes to create a setup where you can plug and unplug your console(s) and other electronics quickly and easily. Then you can use the other 2 hours and 55 minutes to brag on slashdot about how you're so smart.
The peak rate for Southern California Edison (anything a residence uses over about an average of 300kWh per month) is now about 33cents USD per kWh. (I just got first 2006 summer bill)
WOW!
That's just under $3 per watt per year.
A 200watt fileserver for instance is $600 a year to keep running.
A 120watt torrent machine is $360 a year to keep online (plus cost of cable/dsl modem).
Most network routers and switches cost more in a couple years of electric use than their purchase price.
Well, they're a Japanese company and the wiki article doesn't say who made the comment about the light bulb so I'm going to assume it was a Japanese person.
Japanese apartments are lit by 15 and 20W flourescent tubes, and a small incandescent lamp at 5W. "Low-power" then is likely to be 20w or under, probably around 5. Electricity here is fairly expensive, so it won't be like running an XBox 360 full time.
Rumour has it that 1000W and 1200W powersupplies are soon to be standard
Those numbers are meaningless marketing. Power supply manufacturers keep increasing them to make their supplies sound more powerful, but the reality is that they're just finding new (unhelpful) ways to add up the numbers and get a larger figure.
Fundamentally, you cannot describe the power consumption of a PC PSU using a single number. There are too many variables. You *can* describe the drain of an assembled, running PC at a given point in time using a single number, but the only connection it has to the PSU 'rating' is that it will definitely be smaller. You'll find some more informative numbers printed on a sticker on the power supply, telling you the peak drain for each of the rails, but what really matters is the power consumption of all the devices in the computer.
In practice, these '800W' power supplies that you see today are just half a dozen rails (at varying voltages), each of which can supply a peak current of between 100W and 300W. Most of them cannot supply peak current to every rail simultaneously. People upgrade their power supplies to handle high-end video cards and think this means they need to consume 800W instead of 300W. It doesn't. It means that one of the rails supplying their video card needed to handle 200W instead of 150W, or something on that order. Overclockers rarely need a larger amount of power, they need a more expensive power supply that puts out smoother voltage when a noisy load (overclocked CPU) is applied. Etcetera.
So sure, we may soon be needing power supplies that say '1200W' on the box. But that doesn't mean they will consume 50% more power than one that says '800W'.
Actually, there have been at least three publicized core events: the Idaho Falls failure, TMI, and Chernobyl. Of the three, only Chernobyl proceded from full core failure to melt-through. That was due to the poor engineering behind the Russian plant, not to the intrinsic danger of a core event.
For a sense of what is possible, the French SuperPhoenix and Canadian CanDu reactors have combined for millenia of event-free operation. France, by the way, depends on nuclear power for 80% of its electrical needs -- the French are chuckling over the current energy price crunch...all the way to the bank.
Furthermore, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is by no means "uninhabitable" when you get more than about 200m from the sarcophagus itself. Ukraine has taken a very reasonable precaution of maintaining the evacuation, but the area is completely habitable, as demonstrated by the variety of animal and plant life which has taken up residence there.
I'm still worried about the viability of Yucca Mountain, and feel strongly that we need a non-proliferative reprocessing technology before the US adopts nuclear power completely -- but don't deceive yourself about the its problems. They're nowhere nearly as bad as you think, and the mass poisoning coal inflicts on children, in particular, is far worse than you imagine.